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Biology

I’m struggling with teaching Biology to my eldest. Memorizing facts, terms and formulas is really hard for him (he’s dyslexic). He isn’t interested in any kind of a STEM job or STEM major in college, so I just want to cover the basics. Right now I have the Holt McDougal textbook with the digital content as well. It seems like this textbook has more details in it than I remember learning in science. Of course, we’ve discovered more since I was in high school. Just how much do kids these days need to know? Any tips, ideas or thoughts on how to make science more interesting and what the key concepts are that we should focus in on.

Lindsey Carter
Wife to Chris for 19 years and Mom to Wesley 15, Adelaide 14 and Hudson 11

Have you considered CK-12 (www.ck12.org) for your biology text? It's free and it has videos along with the text and quizzes, etc.

Ideas for an alternative biology course:

include books (audios) of people in the field- folks that were responsible for big milestones

do projects instead of tests and quizzes- can do one big one per big unit (cells, genetics, human body, classification, and ecology)

narration- to hear that he is getting the concepts

write about a topic he wants to learn more about- our oldest did a paper comparing the bubonic plague with ebola (which was in the news at the time)

videos- there are a ton out there on biology topics

labs- for some of the concepts

There are lots of ways to see how he's doing at learning the concepts without memorizing a ton of facts.

Oh, but your comment is correct. They've downloaded a lot of advanced concepts into the high school and middle school scope and sequence for biology. For example, I learned gene sequencing as a sophomore in college. By the time I did my student teaching a few years later, I was teaching it to high school AP students. And it's only gotten worse in the last 25+ years.

Thanks ladies for the tips. You've got me thinking. I think I will give him the option of one project, paper, or a test per unit instead of trying to do frequent chapter test that are mainly based on memorizing terms. We'll also try to up the labs and videos and and look at some alternative texts. Thanks again!

Lindsey Carter
Wife to Chris for 19 years and Mom to Wesley 15, Adelaide 14 and Hudson 11

Hi Lindsey,
My oldest isn't in high school yet, so I haven't had to make that decision.
But as a former public high school Biology teacher, I will say there is a lot of Biology (and Chemistry and Physics) that can be investigated without a heavy emphasis on memorization or math. I was also going to suggest having him narrate instead of filling out a worksheet with terms. This will let you see what he is taking away from the chapters, what he finds interesting, and also what concepts he is missing.

You could look at the Friendly Biology Programme. We loved it. Video lectures were a huge deal for my Irlen kid. Also, he offers a 40% restart discount if you're using a curriculum that doesn't work so totally reach out to them if you opt to go this path. No need to memorise long lists of anything, no dissections unless you want to watch those particular videos.. experiments are simplistic but enjoyable.

ETA: all the tests were multiple choice, we did them orally. Some of the questions were meant to be "trick" questions for the student to notice the misspellings, which is questionable for an Irlen kid. In those situations I just asked for the name. It was very very doable. My kid went from HATING biology {Apologia} to enjoying it. He's still not keen on the subject in general {he hates blood and guts and gets very week kneed at the sight, bones are his thing} and has no interest in a career in the field, but he no longer dreaded it to the point of putting it off every day.

Kendra, wife of Lawrence, mother of three.

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.

We are also using the Friendly Biology course now and I really like it (as does my son). Does not all have the HEAVY load of memorizing that other programs have. My son also has dyslexia and this has been a good fit for him. I like the looks of the 101 series too. I'm interested in seeing those too.